chasfh

Perhaps casinos get a cut of the proceeds from their referrals to the ballpark, plus annual fees from Baseball. I would assume a ballgame in Vegas is going to be a gambling experience first.

I can envision them planning for a lot of attendees being comped and transported there by the various casinos. Otherwise, I think you’re right, maybe $75 minimum to get in for standing room, and up from there if you want to rest your ass. If that’s how it’s going to go, I’m thinking the A’s would become an America’s Team instead of a team for Vegas, and as such, I would expect ownership (backed by Baseball itself?) to compete for top talent and spend to get it, at least initially. Because there is nationwide gambling revenue to be made on a situation like this, and Baseball can’t afford to blow this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Honestly, I don’t understand why all the owners think Rob Manfred is such a genius when it comes to running the Game. He’s about to lead Baseball into a lake of fire of its own making over Pete Rose. He completely undermined the value of their property by selling games to Apple+ and Roku for peanuts, causing ESPN to cut their half-a-billion tie to them. (I expect they will come back at a drastically-reduced price.) And now they’ve got two of their major league teams playing in garbage minor-league parks for the next who knows how many years. And this is on top of a thousand little indignities they subject their fans to over issues of soaring ticket and concession prices to watch games, telecast access to games, general treatment at ballparks, and the like. Why the **** are owners letting him destroy their game? I never imagined I’d ever say anything like this, but Rob Manfred is no Bud Selig.

I’m supposed to fly into West Palm tomorrow. And here I was crowing about the idea that there was no chance the plane would run into a military helicopter on descent, because Mar-a-lago.

Exactly. They’re trying to convince the rest of us. I’m wondering whether the warrior-Jesus evangelical base will sign onto that idea.

The only thing I‘m proving is that you said the Democrats lost the election and the government because Joe Biden was moving the party too far left, and then 24 hours later you said we need to elect more Democrats so they can push the party left.

You mean the Joe Biden you said, not 24 hours ago, lost the elections at every level for the Democrats because he was pulling the party too far left? That Joe Biden?

Then maybe it’s about more than just the money for the oligarchs. Maybe it’s also about the thrill of controlling people’s everyday lives at a granular level.

Maybe they see Canada as being the cute girl who needs to be rescued from the swarthy worldly people she’s starting to hang out with.

You mean like Joe Biden?

Trump has already stated in explicit language that the period during which America was great was the Gilded Age, not the 1950s.

Solid code word. Not criticizing you at all. I agree with this.

Probably closer to the truth ...

And speculative history is one of mine. You can’t fix the present without understanding how the past got us here. Recognizing the impact of the Reagan revolution on today’s Trump party, and by extension the country, is not equivalent to throwing up our hands and giving up. And I’m pretty sure that Trump is conclusively demonstrating that whatever economic message the Democrats could come up with that might appeal to the private sector middle class doesn’t matter all that much, because a distressingly high percentage of people did not vote for him because of economics—despite what they might politely tell mainstream media interviewers.

I agree that Democrats need to win back the white working class to win broad-based elections, but that’s not going to happen with even moderate policies that nevertheless get successfully, if unfairly, associated with Marxism or radical anarchism. Because remember: the heyday of D really dominating R among the white working class was during Jim Crow days, when the party simultaneously tolerated a progressive multiracial faction in the northeast and a fascist authoritarian wing dominating everyday life in the south. And once D leadership starting working in the 1960s to truly defang the latter’s power to influence national platforms, that’s when the white working class started to abandon the party in numbers. The unfortunate reality appears to be that at this moment, there’s only one effective way to get them back into the fold at this moment, and I promise you, you wouldn’t like that platform even one bit.

Reagan may not have been the architect of the 30 years succeeding his tenure, and he may have even been horrified by what transpired. But the right wing government-is-evil revolution he ushered in did give the more radical reactionary forces in his party permission and cover to take over the party and ultimately the country, and what any of us speculate Reagan would have done differently had he realized the long-term impact of the movement he championed is not enough to exonerate him.

Given the social history of America, two big reasons Kamala got six million fewer votes than Biden immediately leaps to mind.

Roughly one in 178 voters went for Jill Stein, which is 0.56%, and Kamala lapped Stein at the polls by 87x. And that doesn’t even take into account any votes Stein got that would otherwise have gone to Trump, an equally radical candidate, rather than Kamala, the relatively establishment choice. The far left fringe simply did not cost Kamala the election, nor are they the potent political force dragging down the entire Democratic Party that you and Bill Maher make them out to be.

I don’t necessarily agree with this, but I did see what you did there and I do appreciate the slyness.

Next up: EO allowing Trump and only Trump to serve more than two terms as president.

Trump’s intellect was never his strength.

Is it?

The big takeaway here is that empathy is becoming a dirty word.

Not in the first part, which is the part they like the best and quote the most.

I do like that Trump is experiencing buyer's remorse with ACB.